Whoops, fell behind a bit again.
Book #10 is The War That Ended Peace by Margaret McMillan. I'd read McMillan's previous book, Paris 1919, about the WWI peace process and really loved it, so thought I'd check out her treatise on how the Great War was started in the first place. Especially since, this being 2014, it will be 100 years ago this summer that the War to end all wars broke out.
This was an EXTREMELY dense book. I mean, she is dealing with a cast of thousands and years of events that led to the war breaking out. It's tensions between Germany and England. And France and Germany. And Russia and Germany. And Austria-Hungary and Russia over the Balkans. And just a million other tensions and personality conflicts and war-mongering and just refusal to believe that an all encompassing European war could actually happen. Upon reading this book, you realize that the assassination of the Arch-Duke Ferdinand was really the last step before the War rather than the first step towards it. An excellent read, but definitely not an easy one.
An easier read was book #11, Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi. A loose retelling of Snow White, the book takes place in the 1950s and centers around, and is mainly told by Boy Novak, a woman who escapes an abusive father and moves to a small town in upstate NY where she meets and marries a man and becomes step-mother to the enigmatic, beautiful young girl Snow. Now all is well until Boy has a child and that child... is not what Boy expected. Snow is sent away, Bird is raised without her half-sister and family secrets are brought to light. It's a very, very good book and there is a hell of a bomb dropped at the end, to the point where I hope to heck there's a sequel.
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